Some parts of Christian doctrine are so essential that they must be understood before you try to meaningfully deal with anything else.  If we were going to build an online compendium of Christian Theology, these essential parts would be things that would be frequently hyperlinked in entries all over the collection.

In our times, much of the confusion and misappropriation of Christian theology in the broader world come from misunderstandings or avoidances of these core principles.  I have drafted several entries for this blog recently that all tracked back through one of these key principles in particular: what is sometimes called original sin.  Today, it’s time to just lay out how this concept can be best understood so that future entries can just point to this one so I can avoid having to be repetitive.

Before I begin, I should say this: I know lots of people find this doctrine deeply offputting, but it is a key reason why I began to follow Christ and why I found Christianity compelling as a bullied middle school kid. I believe this single doctrine explains more of what happens in our world than any other single point of philosophy or doctrine in any other ideological or religious system. As G.K. Chesterton said, “[the doctrine of] original sin is the only part of Christian Theology that can really be proved.” There is no shortage of evidence to suggest that we as humans are deeply broken.

Christian theology suggests that all of creation was made perfectly.  This perfection boils down to four key elements:

1. God created everything from nothing.  Everything that exists does so by the design and plan of God—both in substance and in purpose.  Nothing would exist without him.  Everything substantive that exists is ultimately attributable to him.
2. Creation was a perfect expression and representation of God’s will for how things function and relate.  God’s creation at the beginning is a reflection of his essential nature.
3. All of creation exists for the glorification of God, roughly analogous to how a painting exists only because of the painters will and the reactions to it are ultimately gifts to the painter.  (Except in the case of earthly art/artisanship, the artist begins with the elements (medium, etc)—God started from nothing and made the elements that would comprise his art also!)
4. Nothing that was created is evil or bad at the core of its created nature.

Different traditions handle interpretation of the language and descriptions of this with slight variations, but I believe all Christian traditions would be in general agreement with what I have just described.

Though all creation was perfect in the beginning (Genesis 1-2), a series of rebellions marred and broke the face of the creation.  The first of these rebellions was perpetrated by some of the heavenly, created, non-corporeal, spiritual beings.  The most common language to describe these rebellious beings, who were subsequently ejected from heaven and cast down to the earth, are demons—evil spirits whose core state is in rebellion to God (Revelation 12).  The second rebellion was from the people created by God, which was in some ways encouraged by one of these evil spirits in rebellion to God (Genesis 3:1-7).

This second rebellion and the results that spring from it is an event Christian traditions have dubbed “the Fall.”  As Genesis 3:8-24 describes this, the result of the rebellion was a breaking of the perfection that existed prior to the rebellion.  These acts of rebellion against God’s created and perfect order are what the Bible calls sin.  Future acts of rebellion against God’s stated will for humanity are also sin.  As Tim Keller has said, all sin is therefore “anything that doesn’t promote human flourishing”—God’s order is the perfect system to promote flourishing, and departures from it or rebellion against it can only cause additional brokenness. Because we are also descendants of the first people, we are also the heirs of the brokenness they created by their rebellion and are participants in it at the moment we begin to exist–this is the “original” in original sin. We can’t escape it because we are descended from it and know no other way to be.

This breaking affected all parts of the creation, bringing physical division and destruction (including death, natural disaster, diseases, etc), and also mental and physical strife, and the undermining of the creation order which led to broken relationships between all the participants: between the people and God, between the people and creation, and between the people amongst themselves, etc. (Romans 8:20-22, all of human history, etc.)

From the perspective of a single human, this is the introduction of what we would call conflict.  This conflict is an inescapable part of human life post-Fall.  There is nowhere a person could go to fully flee from its aftereffects.  All attempts to subvert it apart from returning to God will ultimately be unsuccessful and will only expedite the continuing fracturing of our world.  It is not stoppable by human effort.  There is no technological advance we can make that would return it to the unbroken state (and even if there was, we would have broken humans trying to use the perfect technology, rendering the existence of technology moot with respect to using it).  There is no system of human cultural organization we can build that is immune from the fact that it is run by broken humans.  The situation from the human perspective is inescapably and inexorably dire.

There are therefore two ways to talk about humanity and our world in it’s ‘natural’ state.  There is ‘natural’ before the Fall: perfect, aligned, unbroken and in full relationship with God; and there is ‘natural’ after it: broken, conflicted, misaligned, destined for death and decay, and with a relationship with God that is damaged or broken.

God was not content to leave the world in this broken state, and before the full effects of the Fall were even known, God had moved to solve the issue of human sinfulness and brokenness by coming himself as Jesus Christ to participate in our broken world and to take the full brunt of that brokenness upon himself (Romans 5).  God’s solution to a problem he didn’t cause was to sacrifice himself to unbreak, one person and situation at a time, the brokenness that effects our world.  Christians are people who have taken God at his word to receive the invitation by grace through faith to right relationship with God in a broken world through and in Jesus Christ, and to be restored day by day by the Holy Spirit and to bring that restoration into the world organically as we obey God and keep his commands.  Because Jesus is the only way to God, other pathways to God to try and bring this wholeness and restoration are ultimately ineffective, no matter how sincere the individuals faith may be (John 14:1-14) or how well-intentioned they are.  This is because it is not our faith or activity which brings wholeness—it is who we believe in: Jesus Christ, and our relationship to the real God as he has chosen to make a pathway to wholeness (Ephesians 2:1-10).  We become heirs with Jesus through his sacrifice, and become able to be restored and reverse the curse of the pattern of sin. Broken people can’t and don’t unbreak themselves—they are only unbroken as they submit to God and he restores them as they submit to his perfect will. Humans are not powerful to unbreak themselves or other broken humans, because wholeness, while infinitely desirable, is not in them. (And the reason it is infinitely desirable is precisely because it is the state humans were originally made to be in!)

The belief in a world created perfectly but broken by rebellion and sin and being restored in Jesus Christ through those who believe by faith through God’s grace is one of the foundations of all Christian doctrine.  From the Christian perspective, any view which properly fails to react to this reality will be necessarily out of phase with the rest of Christian doctrine. In our world today, many mistake one of our “original” states for another, and with disasterous consequences for themselves and others.

There’s no shortage of places where this belief will rear its head, but its important to be clear about the doctrine first so that as we come back to it, we are relying on the same basic belief.  As is necessary, I will return to this piece and make small corrections to add to it’s clarity, but I do not expect the content to change very much.

Listening to: “Everything is Broken” by Kenny Wayne Shepherd (or Dylan, or Sheryl Crow and Jason Isbell’s version…or your favorite artists cover.)